Yasser Zeineldin, CEO of eHosting DataFort, shares insights into his company’s developments over the last year and his predictions for 2017

Over the past year, eHosting DataFort (eHDF), part of the MIDIS Group and reputed operator within the data centre, managed hosting and cloud infrastructure space, has remained diligent in its efforts to improve its capabilities and service offerings.

eHDF acquired a number of certifications in 2016 alone, particularly around security and quality management standards. This included being awarded the Cloud Security Alliance Star (CSA Star) certification on cloud security, as well as the latest ISO/IEC 2700.

Furthermore, the company has also added business continuity planning to its repertoire, a process which creates systems for recover from outages, designed with both pre-defined recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.

On the technology front, eHDF has made great strides towards software-defined data centres (SDDC). Beginning with software-defined network, SDDCs are data storage facilities in which all elements of the infrastructure, be it network, storage, CPU and security, are virtualised and delivered as a service.

“The world is moving towards what we identify as software-defined networks and data centres. You isolate the functionality from the actual hardware and the functionality of network management controls and so forth, which can all be defined through the software layer,” explains Yasser Zeineldin CEO of eHosting DataFort.

“So that gives ease of configuration, management and troubleshooting. We are also deploying the latest Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) … we have invested heavily on technology, to be able to offer our clients the latest in terms of software-defined data centres,” he adds.

Elsewhere, eHDF has invested heavily in storage, particularly with all-flash storage array, a solid-state type storage that is both faster and more reliable that traditional disk arrays.

The company has also focused its efforts towards improving its security capabilities with the launch of a new cyber defence centre.

With the continued push of assets going online and being connected via a variety of devices, the market has reached a point where organisations have to make a trade-off between productivity and addressing the need for mobility, with maintaining a secure operation.

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To that end, eHDF launched its new cyber defence centre as a means to secure their client’s infrastructure, regardless of where assets are based.

Commenting on the latest market changes, Zeineldin highlights a recent shift in demand from end-users that want “a faster time to market that is driven by digital initiatives.”

“They say ‘I don’t want to worry about establishing a full IT infrastructure. I want to get the computing capacity that I need and get it managed as fast as possible from the service provider and pay predictable monthly bill, as opposed to having to build it myself’,” explains eHDF’s CEO.

“We are seeing more and more small-to-medium enterprises taking this route … in the past people would start by hiring an IT team, budgeting for CAPEX to buy your gear — looking at who is going to support. They found that this is really going to take a long time.”

Looking ahead to 2017, Zeineldin predicts that there will be a sharp increase in cloud adoption. This will be especially the case with private cloud, which will see increased deployment either on premise with the customer or via private hosting.

Zeineldin expects to see enterprises place a lot more emphasis on protecting their IT infrastructure, review their respective security postures and identify potential vulnerabilities that will need to addressed.

He also predicts that there will be increased adoption of software as service model, particularly for small and medium sized enterprises.

“I think some of the analytics projects, which were overhyped, you are going to see some of them really showing good returns in terms of large scale analytics. Some of these were at pilot stages back in 2015 and 2016, but will start to show some fruition in 2017,” comments Zeineldin.

“Internet-of-Things — I think 2017 will also be the year where you will see some projects coming into fruition, mainly within the transport and logistics space,” he concludes.